Greetings from the little town of Kilifi. We are staying in Takaungu village, but today after dropping Claire at school in the village, Lyanda and I took the little village boat across the inlet, walked two and a half miles across a beautiful (if depressing from an ecological perspective) sisal plantation, down a long baobab tree-shaded lane, then caught a minibus into town in search of some internet, some cash, and some peanut butter from the store.
Life in Takaungu village this week is great. We are guests of the East African Center, a community development project founded by a Seattle woman, and now the site of multiple vibrant programs, and multiple American volunteers. I visited Takaungu village in 2002 when the program was just getting started, to make their first fundraising video. It’s great to be back, in many ways it’s just as I left it (slow pace, laid back village, simple poverty of most of the homesteads) and in many ways there have been big changes – The East African Center now runs a primary school, a clinic, and many other programs.

Claire really wanted to go to the school, and so she’s there (in “Standard Four”) today for a second day, sitting in the little tin-roof classroom with the other kids, enjoying the strict pattern of rote memorization and formality that is the hallmark of even progressive private Kenyan education. (Ask, “how are you, children?” and all the children jump to their feet and yell in unison “We are very fine teacher!”) The school is about half Muslim and half Christian, and the school girls were a little shy on Monday. As fascinated by Claire as she was by them, they were still hesitant to actually talk to her or engage her yesterday. But Claire was excited to go back today (even though the 45 minutes of incomprehensible daily Swahili class is “really boring”), and hopefully the girls are all warming up and finding things to giggle about.

Meanwhile Lyanda and I have mostly just wandered the village, soaking in the sights, greeting the folks we wander past, and jumping under leafy mango trees when the occasional torrential cloudburst threatens to soak us to the core. Mangos are in season here, big juicy ripe mangos practically dripping from every tree, and the corn is knee high, and the women seem to spend about half the day toting enormous jugs of water back and forth to their homes, balanced on top of their heads.

Today (after the 2.5 mile walk back) I’ll start helping the center with a little video project, and try to squeeze in a couple of Kiswahili classes with Mr Aziz the retired teacher they have engaged for the volunteers, but mostly it’s just a slow-paced week of village life. We don’t have e-mail in the village so I’m just posting text messages from my phone from there, but you can trust that we are comfortable and happy, and we’ll get back to the blog and upload more village pictures from Watamu this weekend.

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